Twelve-year-old Kayleah Wilson set out from her family’s apartment in the 2800 block of 28th Street in Greeley on the afternoon of March 28, 2010 to walk to a friend’s birthday party.

She was wearing a white-and-pink shirt over a white tank top, blue jeans and white-and-red shoes. She was 5-feet-2 and weighed about 140 pounds.

The Brentwood Middle School sixth grader was supposed to meet a friend at the Greeley Mall and together they were going to walk to the birthday party. Kayleah never met her friend and didn’t show up for the birthday party.

The peculiar thing about 12-year-old Kayleah Wilson’s disappearance was that she vanished in broad daylight in a heavily traveled area in Greeley. She was last seen at 3:40 p.m.

The path she would have taken includes heavily traveled roadways. Police requested an Amber alert throughout Colorado. But none was issued because there was no evidence she was a runaway, nor was there any obvious indication of foul play initially.

The next day, police began canvassing the neighborhood, including an area south of the Greeley mall. The investigation became very intensive. Police reviewed videotape of the mall and from businesses in Greeley to see if they could spot the young girl captured on surveillance cameras. They couldn’t find any.

Kirk Mitchell is a general assignment reporter at The Denver Post who focuses on criminal justice stories. He began working at the newspaper in 1998, after writing for newspapers in Mesa, Ariz., and Twin Falls, Idaho, and The Associated Press in Salt Lake City. Mitchell first started writing the Cold Case blog in Fall 2007, in part because Colorado has more than 1,400 unsolved homicides.